Mediaboss Marketing

Republicans searching for consensus on how to pay for tax cuts are beginning to weigh attacking spending in potentially sensitive areas of the budget.

Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch told Bloomberg he prefers to find spending cuts to pay for a tax overhaul, though he stopped short of guaranteeing any outcome.

Thats what should be the solution, Ill put it that way, Hatch, a Utah Republican, said Thursday. And Im hopeful that the Republicans will work to do that. Id like to find some spending cuts. Were spending us into oblivion."

GOP leaders have not moved off their calls for revenue-neutral tax legislation -- that is, a bill that balances tax cuts with other provisions that would raise revenue. Still, a growing number of Republican lawmakers is calling for abandoning that concept.

Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, a leader of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, called for $400 billion in unspecified cuts to welfare programs to help cover the cost of tax cuts. Thats the way to unlock the logjam in the House on setting tax and spending levels in a budget resolution, Jordan said Friday at an event sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative policy and advocacy group. Drawing up a budget resolution is a procedural prerequisite for Congress to tackle a tax overhaul.

At issue is how to comply with Senate rules that require 60 votes for any bill that adds to the long-term budget deficit. Republicans have only 52 votes in the chamber, and they arent counting on Democratic support. So tax-overhaul legislation must either avoid increasing the deficit or set its changes to expire within 10 years.

House Speaker Paul Ryan has proposed financing tax cuts with new revenues, but his proposals -- including imposing a border-adjusted tax on U.S. companies imports and eliminating their ability to deduct net interest payments -- face considerable opposition. No consensus has emerged on any other ways to raise revenue, however.

The political facts are that there is not consensus for the border-adjustment tax, said Representative Mark Meadows, the Freedom Caucus chairman.

Jordan and Meadows said the Freedom Caucus wont insist on revenue-neutral legislation, meaning some tax provisions would have to automatically expire in 10 years. Some of the tax cuts could be temporary, so you dont have to get full revenue-neutral, Jordan said.

Republican Senator David Perdue of Georgia, a staunch opponent of the border-tax proposal, also floated spending cuts as a possible offset for a tax-cut package. Representative Mark Sanford of South Carolina floated a hybrid -- revenue-raisers and spending cuts, particularly for entitlement programs -- of offsets.

Get the latest on global politics in your inbox, every day.

Get our newsletter daily.

Achieving spending cuts on a large scale is easier said than done. The costliest programs in the U.S. budget are Medicare, Social Security and defense spending, which President Donald Trump has promised not to cut. The discretionary part of the budget has faced deep cuts in recent years, and many Republicans are reluctant to go further. That leaves mandatory spending, which covers popular safety-net programs like unemployment benefits, food stamps and veterans benefits.

If we dont get after mandatory spending, we will bankrupt our country, Representative Warren Davidson, an Ohio Republican. And that is not compassionate and we should not let that happen.

Some Republicans see no way out of the logjam other than to change the rules and allow deficit-raising tax cuts for a longer time horizon. Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania cast doubt on the prospects for consensus on major spending cuts and instead has called for imposing a 30-year time horizon for budgetary changes that can add to the deficit.

I hope were not going to hold ourselves to something that is revenue-neutral, because then were not going to get good tax reform, Toomey said.

But Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell havent revised their calls for revenue-neutral tax reform. The White House hasnt taken a definitive position on that question, and the lack of guidance has fueled a free-for-all political environment. But the clock is ticking, and Republicans are eager to see some progress soon in order to keep hope alive of passing a tax bill in 2017.

Weve got to make some decisions, Meadows said. It is time to make some decisions.

Read more from the original source:
Republicans Tiptoe Toward Safety-Net Cuts to Unlock Tax 'Logjam' - Bloomberg

Mitch McConnell has a quick, dirty job. Photo: Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images

Not long ago, a Senate Republican aide made a devastating confession to reporter Caitlin Owens about the GOP health-care law: Best to get it over with and move on to things Republicans are good at. The devastating part here is not the desire to get it over with but the concession that writing legislation concerning health care, one of the most vital domestic functions of government, is a function the party is constitutionally incapable of performing.

The Republican Party is incapable of passing a health-care bill that is not absolutely horrific. That may sound like a partisan statement, but it is one Republicans themselves have shown, not only through their words but also through their actions, that they believe themselves.

The American Health Care Act, which passed the House last month, is a shockingly unpopular bill that even most conservative policy analysts dislike. They hate the bill because it fails to advance any theory, conservative or liberal, of a functioning health-care system. It does not harness any set of incentives or mechanisms that could plausibly reduce costs or resolve the failures of the system. The only thing it does is cut spending for people in the exchanges and on Medicaid.

The details of the emerging Senate bill seem to be conceptually similar. Republicans promised to take their time and get it right, but they very quickly changed their mind about this. The Senate bill replicates the House bill in its overall design, which is Obamacare-but-a-lot-less-of-it.

The primary emerging difference between the Senate health bill and the House appears to be that the Senate is phasing in its cuts to health-care subsidies more slowly. Rather than a three-year phase-out, they may go for five years or even seven. That is the moderate wing of the Republican party in its essence: They will complain loudly and then ultimately do the same thing the far right wants, only not quite as fast.

The slower phase-out is designed to insulate incumbent Republican elected officials from the public backlash that is sure to ensue. By the time the cuts take effect, the vote to enact them will have been long past. Indeed, Republicans may not even control government at that point.

In pointed contrast to the leisurely pace of implementing the GOP plan is the frantic pace of passing it into law. The Senate GOP is determined to vote before the end of the month. Rushing to pass a bill that wont take effect for many years may seem like a joke, but both elements serve the common purpose of minimizing democratic accountability for its extremely unpopular choices.

In 2010, when the Democrats passed their health-care bill after dozens of hearings and months of open debate, Nancy Pelosi made a statement that Republicans made infamous: We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it away from the fog of the controversy. Pelosi believed that, once the public could actually see how the new system operated, its features would be understood the bill did not contain death panels, did not force people out of their employer insurance, did not threaten Medicare beneficiaries, and so on. It was an optimistic, perhaps nave belief. (Obamacare did not become popular until this year, when Republican threats to end the law made the public finally appreciate what it had.) But Pelosi did believe that public exposure to the laws actual operation would redound to its benefit.

Republicans have a very different belief. They have no confidence the public will like what the law does when they see it. Instead they believe the opposite, which they have confessed with shocking bluntness. I dont think this gets better over time, said Republican Missouri senator Roy Blunt, a member of leadership. This is not like fine wine, it doesnt get better with age, admits Lindsey Graham.

The Republicans have spent eight years insisting that they could produce a better health-care-reform plan if they had the chance. They have come to realize that this promise was false. The only thing they can do is rip away the benefits Obamacare has given millions of Americans. Their sole objective now is to do so with the minimum level of transparency or accountability.

The administration was trying to reassure Qatar that it has Americas support, when Trump declared Doha a funder of terrorism at a very high level.

The network said it will not be moving forward with the second season of Aslans show Believer.

The president says he never encouraged Comey to drop the FBIs investigation into Michael Flynn and would be happy to say so under oath.

The NBA and NHL could crown champions, Nadal is in the French Open finals, and USA vs. Mexico at Estadio Azteca.

All the norms the president has already destroyed.

Republicans realize they cant write a decent health-care plan. That isnt stopping them.

Theres a group of guys in a back room somewhere that are making these decisions.

The First Daughter called her current plan a placeholder and is open to other approaches, according to a report.

After a horrific election, she is managing to form a minority government. But her political situation is fragile.

A White House pick voiced a certain view of who is eligible for salvation. The Vermont senator considered that disqualifying.

Comey made unauthorized disclosures to the press of privileged communications with the president, Marc Kasowitz said.

The president says that James Comey is a liar and also a reliable source who completely and totally vindicates him.

In which Jezzas high five goes spectacularly wrong.

Smart tech-boy Jared Kushner will try to modernize the government.

The nations most expensive House race just keeps getting pricier.

The attorney general has admitted to two meetings with the Russian ambassador. There may have been a third.

She called an election early to shore up her majority and now her political future is in doubt.

The U.K. election shows the populism weve seen bolster the right is a fickle beast.

Hes been uncharacteristically quiet, but aides worry this is just the calm before the tweetstorm.

Defying expectations, Theresa May did not buttress her majority and Labour did not fall apart under Jeremy Corbyn. Either could wind up in power.

See original here:
Republicans Know Their Health-Care Plan Is Garbage. They Might Pass It Anyway. - New York Magazine

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. Kansas was at the heart of the tea party revolution, a red state where, six years ago, a deeply conservative group of Republicans took the state for a hard right turn. Now, after their policies failed to produce the results GOP politicians promised, the state has become host to another revolution: a resurgence of moderate Republicans.

Moderate Republicans joined with Democrats this week to raise state taxes, overriding GOP Gov. Sam Brownbacks veto and repudiating the conservative governors platform of ongoing tax cuts. The vote was a demonstration of the moderates newfound clout in the state Republican Party. Brownback was unable to successfully block the bill because many of the die-hard tax cut proponents had either retired or been voted out of office, losing to more centrist candidates in GOP primaries.

The citizens of Kansas have said Its not working. We dont like it. And theyve elected new people. said Sheila Frahm, a centrist Republican who served as lieutenant governor of Kansas and briefly as a U.S. senator.

Kansass moderate ascendance may portend problems for Republicans in Washington, where many in the party, including President Trump, are pushing to adopt federal tax policies similar to the ones Brownback has installed in Kansas. But while Brownback had hoped what he called Kansass real-live experiment in conservative economic policy would become a national model, it has instead become a cautionary example.

Brownback and his promised tax cuts were expected to spur enough economic growth to keep the government well funded, but when that economic boom never materialized, state lawmakers faced perennial deficits and had to implement spending reductions to close the gap. And when they did, some lawmakers found that while promising to cut spending plays well during a campaign, the subsequent loss of public services often proves far more unpopular.

Kansas seems to be ahead of the curve, said Rep. Melissa Rooker, a Republican who represents a suburb of Kansas City. If you look at the national political scene right now, I think it seems to me were about ready for a course correction.

That conclusion will be tested in the upcoming gubernatorial Republican primary, when representatives of the partys more moderate and more conservative wings will square off to replace Brownback when his term expires.

Nobody wants to pay more taxes, but they also dont want to live in a state that is fiscally reckless, said Republican Ed OMalley, a former state representative and now a primary candidate.

Kris Kobach, Brownbacks secretary of state who was once thought likely to join the Trump administration, entered the contest this week and is decrying the new tax increase. It is time to drain the swamp in Topeka, he wrote on Twitter on Wednesday, borrowing a phrase from President Trump.

This state does not need more money, and the people of Kansas do not need to keep feeding the government monster with year after year of increased taxes, Kobach told supporters in a speech announcing his candidacy. Kansas does not have a revenue problem. Kansas has a spending problem.

The states deep spending cuts to schools and programs aimed at helping the poor have been especially controversial. Michael Speer, a schools superintendent and business manager in Coffeyville a town near Kansass border with Oklahoma says he previously voted for Brownback, but is now troubled by the changes forced on his profession.

Were trying to make all the money stretch as far as it can, Speer said. We made a conscious effort to not impact the classroom. But I cant continue to cut custodial staff.

I can no longer support him, Speer said of Brownback.

The gubernatorial primary will involve competition for voters like Judith Deedy. A registered Republican who lives in the Kansas City suburb of Mission Hills, Deedy said that she was never very interested in politics until she and parents at their local public school started to notice a shift.

The school increased its class sizes and scaled back gifted education. Teachers, worried about their wages and future, began fleeing the Kansas City, Kansas school system for jobs across the state line in Missouri. Now she is an avid opponent of Brownbacks tax cuts.

In 2016, enough people woke up and said, We have to fix this. The guys in office are refusing to fix this, and come on, the evidence is plain, she said. I really dont care if its a Democrat or a Republican, I just want someone reasonable.

Meanwhile, Brownbacks remaining supporters have been quick to lambaste moderate Republicans for enacting what they have termed the largest tax increase in Kansas history.

Jeff Glendening, the state director for Americans for Prosperity, pledged retaliation. The conservative organization, funded in part by the wealthy Koch brothers, will campaign against Republican lawmakers who voted to raise taxes, he said.

Well be busy with our activists holding those legislators accountable for raising those taxes, Glendening said. This issue is not going to go away.

What happens in Kansas breaks so significantly with Republican orthodoxy on taxes, said Stephen Moore, a former adviser to both Trump and Brownback.

Theres one thing that unifies the Republican Party today more than anything else. We are a tax-cutting party. We are not a tax-increasing party, Moore said. I think Republicans across the country have to be paying attention to this.

The return to more centrist policies could foreshadow trouble for Trumps tax plan, which is based on the same concepts that guided Brownbacks overhaul beginning in 2012. Trump has proposed reducing the number of different rates on marginal income and setting all of them at lower levels, as Brownback did.

Trump has also proposed slashing taxes for small businesses. Brownback exempted small-business income from taxation entirely, opening what analysts described as a loophole, in which individuals represented themselves as small businesses to qualify for the tax break.

Trump has not issued a detailed proposal since taking office, but in April the White House released a one-page document on tax policy that reiterated these basic principles.

A plan put forward a year ago by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), contains some similar provisions. The resemblance points to the connections between Brownback and the conservative establishment in Washington. Before becoming a congressman himself, Ryan served on Brownbacks staff when the governor represented Kansas in the Senate.

Trump and Brownback have relied on the same advisers, including the conservative economist Arthur Laffer, who famously laid out the principle of supply side economics on a cocktail napkin. Laffer argued that excessive taxation could slow the economy by discouraging people from working. His signature theory was that the government, by cutting taxes, could encourage people to earn more, maintaining or increasing overall tax revenue. Yet most economists believe that U.S. tax rates are already far too low to benefit from Laffers curve.

The tax cuts for the wealthy frequently advocated by Republican politicians are viewed unfavorably by many voters, polls show. The Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan group that conducts public-opinion surveys, found that 57 percent of Americans nationally, including over a third of Republicans, support increasing taxes on those earning at least $250,000 a year. By contrast, Brownbacks policies reduced them drastically.

Yet Dan Cox, the institutes research director, said that Brownbacks defeat did not augur more victories for Republicans pursuing more moderate economic policies. He said Republican policymakers and their advisers around the country are likely to view the example of Kansas as a failure of implementation, rather than one of principle, and they will argue that Kansass experiment would have succeeded had the legislature reduced spending even more.

Moreover, Cox said, the business lobby remains more influential in the party than those who support centrist or populist points of view.

Trump was supposed to upend that, but it looks like hes not going to, Cox said. Despite the rebuke that conservative economic policy received in the last election, it doesnt necessarily mean that were going to see the same thing happen on the national stage.

Read the original:
Republicans are predicting the beginning of the end of the tea party in Kansas - Washington Post

The FBI chief he fired called the president a liar, but the response from many Republicans was a collective shrug. The GOP still needs Donald Trump if it has any hope of accomplishing its legislative agenda and winning elections, and it's going to take more than James Comey's testimony to shake them.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Friday boasted of the GOP's accomplishments under Trump thus far, and promised more to come, making no mention of Comey in a speech. A group of House conservatives discussed taxes and the budget, with no reference to Comey or the federal investigations into Russia's election meddling and possible collusion with the Trump campaign.

Elsewhere, there were few outward signs of concern from the top Republican officials, donors and business leaders who gathered largely behind closed doors in Park City, Utah, for a conference hosted by former presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

"The people in this room, who give money to the Republican Party and who are focused on helping get Republicans elected, they do it because they believe in an agenda," Spencer Zwick, House Speaker Paul Ryan's fundraising chief, said in an interview. As for the Comey testimony, "there's nothing we can do about it," Zwick said.

It all underscored what's become a hardening dynamic of the Trump presidency: Republicans on Capitol Hill and off are mostly sticking with the president despite the mounting scandals and seemingly endless crises that surround him.

Though some are privately concerned, and frustration is regularly voiced about the president's undisciplined administration and the distractions he creates, Republicans have scant incentive to abandon him now. Trump's signature remains key to the still-nascent GOP agenda, and he has the ability to appoint judges to lifetime appointments, a thrilling prospect for conservatives.

And, despite Trump's low approval ratings nationally, his core base of supporters remains firmly behind him. Those voters will be key to the GOP's success in next year's midterms when Republicans will be defending a fragile majority in the House and looking to pick up seats in the Senate, thanks to a favorable map that has a large group of Democratic incumbents up for re-election in states that voted for Trump.

"I think the last 24, 48 hours were all good for the president, confirmed he was telling the truth all along, that he wasn't under investigation," GOP Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio said Friday, referring to Comey's confirmation that he had informed Trump that the president wasn't being personally investigated.

Comey also bluntly accused the Trump White House of lying, asserted that Trump asked him to back off an investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, and contended that Trump fired him in an effort to change the course of the Russia investigation. But Republicans chose to ignore those things and focus on the aspects of Comey's testimony on Thursday that were favorable to Trump. Trump himself, appearing alongside the president of Romania on Friday, attacked Comey and said some of his testimony wasn't true.

"I think he was exonerated," GOP Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina, who chairs the conservative House Freedom Caucus, said Friday of Trump. "He said that he wasn't under investigation and indeed that was verified."

Ryan and other Republicans explained away Trump's interactions with Comey as the understandable blunders of a Washington neophyte.

"It's no secret to anybody that this president is not experienced in the ways of Washington, of how these investigations work," said GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who sits on the intelligence committee. "When you have the FBI director telling you three times you're not the subject of an investigation and you ask him, 'would you please announce that publicly' and he refuses, I can understand why the president would be frustrated by that."

Outraged Democrats argued that Comey had laid out all the elements of an obstruction of justice case, even as Democratic leaders tried to tamp down calls for impeachment coming from some liberals, including some members of Congress. Chances that Republicans themselves would initiate or even consider impeachment proceedings were zero, and that will change only if the Justice Department special counsel on the case, Robert Mueller, delivers a verdict they cannot ignore whenever his investigation concludes.

To be sure, not all Republicans were so quick to dismiss Comey's testimony and the Russia investigation.

The Tucson Weekly published quotes from what it said was a private talk by GOP Rep. Martha McSally of Arizona to the Arizona Bankers Association last week. McSally, who represents a closely divided district targeted by Democrats, expressed concerns that the House majority could be at risk partly because of "distractions" from Trump and his tweets.

"Any Republican member of Congress, you are going down with the ship. And we're going to hand the gavel to Pelosi in 2018," McSally said, referring to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California. "The path to that gavel being handed over is through my seat. And right now, it doesn't matter that it's me, it doesn't matter what I've done. I have an 'R' next to my name and right now, this environment would have me not prevail."

A litmus test comes in two weeks when voters chose a new House member in a competitive Georgia district, where a GOP loss would unnerve some two dozen incumbents like McSally.

Associated Press writers Michelle Price in Park City, Utah, and Andrew Taylor in Washington contributed to this report.

Excerpt from:
With an eye on agenda, Republicans shrug off Comey revelations, stick with Trump - Chicago Tribune

New York Times

Republicans' Secretive Plan for Health Care New York Times Republicans in the Senate will need 50 votes to pass their version of the American Health Care Act. Several senators have expressed reservations about the House version of the bill, which withdraws federal support for Planned Parenthood and rolls back ... Republicans are making Trumpcare happen while no one is lookingVICE News Senate Republicans Hope You Won't Notice They're About to Repeal ObamacareThe Nation. Senate Republicans consider keeping parts of Obamacare they once promised to killWashington Post snopes.com -MSNBC -Daily Kos -Politico all 587 news articles »

Excerpt from:
Republicans' Secretive Plan for Health Care - New York Times